Love's Survival Read online

  Forbidden Love in the Combat Zone

  Book One

  by

  Parker Lee

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Notice: The views expressed herein are NOT endorsed by the United States Government, Department of Defense or Department of the Army.

  LOVE’S SURVIVAL

  Copyright © 2019 by Parker Lee

  All rights reserved. Published by Muddy Boots After Dark.

  Edited by Aurora Dewater

  Cover art designed by AJ Powers

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  1

  “Bravo Team! I want you to take down that house. Got it?”

  Craig peered through his night vision goggles at the house his squad leader told him to clear. His squad leader was using an infrared laser pointer to highlight which building he referred to. It was a two-story stone structure with a six-foot high wall surrounding it, just like ninety percent of every other building in this hellish city.

  “Roger, Sergeant,” Craig replied woodenly. His company had been in the thick of the fighting for weeks, testing themselves against insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. They were tired beyond belief and needed more than what a simple shower could provide. They needed to be scrubbed down with hard-bristle brushes while someone sprayed them with a fire hose, given a triple dose of antibiotics, and allowed to sleep for days on end with no interruptions.

  He examined the house for a few minutes, then decided on his entry point. “Okay, Bravo Team,” Craig whispered as he gathered his three men around him. “Drop your rucks here.” He waited as the men dropped their heavy packs full of ammunition, food, and water. When they were done, he said, “We’ve gotta take down that two-story piece of crap over there so we can get some height off the streets. Maybe we can catch a couple hours of shut eye. Standard stack through the gate. You know the direct path from the gate to the front door is covered by IEDs, so we peel left and right, alternating through. Then we’ll move up to the house. We go in hard and fast. Kill anything that moves.”

  “Hoorah, Sarge,” Private McDuffy grunted.

  Craig hated when people called him “Sarge.” It made him feel much older than his twenty-three years. He shook his head and stood, bent over at the waist behind a burnt out truck in the street. “Moving now, Sergeant Anderson,” he said over the radio handset he had affixed to his helmet’s chinstrap.

  “Acknowledged,” his squad leader replied. “Be safe, Cantrell. We’re almost out of this garbage dump. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Craig turned his face toward the older soldier twenty meters away and grinned. Even their teeth were stained from all of the chewing tobacco they’d been ingesting in an effort to maintain a semblance of alertness during the extended operation to clear and capture the insurgent-held city of Fallujah. They were a disgusting bunch. “We won’t take any unnecessary risks, Sergeant.”

  He looked back at his three-man fire team and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  They filed around the truck and sprinted as best as their sore, tired, and filth-ridden bodies would allow them to go. Craig reached the target house first and waited for his men to stack up. An infantry fire team leader was the only person in the US Army who consistently led from the front. His job was to take point on patrols, be the number one man in the stack, and be the first person who came in contact with the enemy. As such, he’d be the first man through the gate.

  He loved his job.

  He pressed his left shoulder against the rough wall. From what he could tell, it was a typical house like they’d seen a hundred times in Fallujah over the past few weeks: brick construction, covered by a thick, mud or cement layer. It made going through anywhere except a door or low window impossible.

  Three quick taps on his shoulder told him that all three of his men were in position. He grunted and dipped his head to spit out the built up chewing tobacco saliva, his team’s unofficial signal to breach. Private McDuffy, a big, hulking kid from Alabama, moved around the team to stand directly in front of the gate for a moment until he repositioned himself to the side. McDuffy swung the large metal battering ram that he held and brought it crashing into the metal gate, just above the handle.

  The noise was deafening on the silent street. Off in the distance, the Marines were in a firefight, but the street that Second Squad found themselves on was quiet until this moment. As the ram reverberated off the metal, Craig was aware of two things before he stepped through the doorway. First, that the door swung to the left, that meant he’d turn right inside and Specialist Jacobs would go left. The second thing his mind processed as he attacked was that a chorus of Middle Eastern voices called out in surprise and warning to one another. The sounds came from the target house.

  Then he was through the gate, rifle up, scanning the area in front of him for threats to his men.

  2

  Kelsey shielded her face against the swirling dirt and grime. She wore heavy-duty goggles to protect her eyes and a bandana over her mouth and nose, but the big helicopter’s blades would force sand into every crevasse and opening anyway. It was only a matter of how much, and where, the dust and sand would end up.

  The medevac bird was bringing in another patient from the meat grinder in Fallujah. She dreaded every one of them that came in. It was heartbreaking to see all the soldiers and Marines injured, permanently disfigured, and hurting. They were America’s finest, in the prime of their young lives, and her job was to help save them.

  The heavy wheels touched down and someone behind her shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Her stretcher team ran forward, hunched at the waist to avoid a crazy mishap with the rotors if a large gust of wind came through and rocked the helicopter. The doors on the dark green Blackhawk flew open and she stood next to the bird, waiting for the flight medic to tell them which patient they were taking first.

  The heat from the engines above burned the back of her neck where her uniform didn’t cover her skin and the overpowering smell of sulfur from the burning fuel assailed her nostrils, making her gag. She pushed the minor inconveniences to the side. She had a job to do, and the boys on this helicopter needed her to focus.

  Kelsey took a deep breath as the men on the helicopter passed the first stretcher to her and she slid it along to her teammates. She examined the soldier, praying that she never had to see her boyfriend Craig’s face from this vantage point.

  It wasn’t him. It was another young man with a gunshot wound to the stomach. She suppressed the slight feeling of relief that flooded through her system as she gripped the stretcher’s wooden handle and immediately felt guilty that she’d been glad it was someone else. Her team jogged quickly, but carefully, away from the helicopter. She heard the engines change pitch and then another burst of hot sand hit her in the back as the bird lifted away from the helipad.

  Then they were alone, running toward the hospital entrance. They were through in seconds and went directly into the triage point. Her fellow medics began cutting away clothing up near the injured man’s torso as someone else looked at the casualty feeder card attached to his uniform top to determine what, if any, medications had been given to him in the field.

  Kelsey pulled utility shears from her pocket and cut the laces on the man’s left boot. She tried to slide the shoe off, but it wouldn’t budge. “His feet are swollen,” Adams, a medic on the eighth month of his deployment, stated. “You’ll have to cut through the leather.”

  She nodded and slid the scissors into the top of the soldier’s boot, then began cutting down the side. The heavy-duty shears made quick work of the material and she cut the other side. As she pulled away the boot, the smell of rot hit her. The soldier’s foot was a mass of loose, waterlogged skin and layers of flesh that hung from it. Every step must have been agony for the man, but he’d continued to fight.

  Once the boots, socks and trousers were cut away, the medics began a quick scrub-down with heavy sponges to wipe away the filth as best they could to prep the man for surgery. When she was finished, her bucket of mildly soapy water was black. The guys out on extended operations were often covered in this type of grime, which complicated injuries due to infection.

  From start to finish, the task had only taken her team four minutes. Then the soldier was wheeled away into the operating room where doctors waited to save his life. She sighed, and picked up the boot she’d cut away. It went into a large trash can, along with the other boot and the guy’s undergarments. Adams picked up the pants and uniform top, then went through every pocket, removing all personal effects, while an NCO watched to verify and document that all items were collected. Everything went into a large Ziploc bag with a new form that included as much of the soldier’s information as they had.

  Kelsey glanced at the form, her breath catching in her throat. He was from Craig’s unit. Craig was in Alpha Company, 1-9 Infantry, that guy was in Bravo Company. They were probably right next to one another when he was injured.

  She bent down, picking up her bucket as she tried to suppress the overwhelming emotions inside her. She and Craig had only dated for three months—half of that time he’d been gone, fighting in Fallujah—but she already had very strong f
eelings for him. If anything happened to him…

  She stopped that line of thought and pushed her way to the door carrying the dirty water. They disposed of the cleaning bucket contents several hundred yards from the hospital to help avoid contamination. The walk helped to clear her mind and by the time she flung the water over the fenced off area, she felt better.

  Craig was damn good at what he did. He made sergeant, and consequently, team leader, within only two years. He and his men trained constantly. They knew what they were doing. He’d come back to her. He would.

  That was her mantra. It was the only thing that kept her from breaking down each night.

  3

  Four days later, the operation to retake Fallujah was complete. The Army and the Marine Corps had successfully eliminated thousands of insurgents who’d taken up residence in the abandoned city.

  Kelsey had been picking at her breakfast in the dining facility when the announcement came on the Armed Forces Network television broadcast. The bulk of the combat forces had already left and the Engineers had moved in to begin the slow, systematic clearing of the IEDs and booby traps that the insurgents placed when they prepared to defend the city.

  That meant Craig would be back to the base soon. When they’d left, all of the battalion’s vehicles, the tanks and the tank-like troop-carrying vehicles called Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, had been loaded up onto semi-trucks and hauled northward to the city. That added a couple of days on either side of the operation, but he should be back soon.

  She turned to her roommate in excitement. Anna also had a boyfriend away for the mission, one of the artillery guys who’d supported the infantrymen from the outskirts of the city. Both of their affairs were a direct violation of General Order Number One, which forbade relationships amongst US military personnel deployed to anywhere in the Middle East. Hundreds of people hooked up while they were here, though. They weren’t alone in their discretions.

  They each made guesses as to when their men would be back. It was purely guesswork, but it made them feel better to do so. Across the dining facility, several other groups of soldiers chatted excitedly about the prospects of the units’ return. It was inevitable that men and women in their early twenties and late teens would form couples when placed together in a foreign country with no other prospects. Having a large, regional field hospital with almost sixty percent women on staff alongside several all-male combat units just exacerbated the problem.

  The day went quickly at the hospital as several soldiers were flown in from an IED blast that hit a convoy out in Ramadi. Out of five personnel in the truck when it was hit, only three of them survived to make it to the hospital. It was yet another tragic day in Iraq and Kelsey longed for Craig’s strong arms around her to comfort her.

  Several hours later, she briefed her night shift replacement about the day’s activities and what tasks still needed finishing. Then, she checked with her supervisor before leaving. Once she was cleared to go, she waited outside at the hospital’s break tables for Anna to be released. The base commander had mandated that no one would walk alone on base without, at a minimum, two people in the group, so Kelsey had to wait until her roommate was ready to go back to their room.

  The hospital hadn’t received a medevac in several hours, so Anna was released on time. The two of them walked back to their small room, a one-room trailer called a CHU, the shorthand term for a containerized housing unit. When they’d arrived in theater a few months ago, their beds had been bunked and the wall lockers lined up on the wall, leaving an open space on the floor where they assumed the previous occupants had set up a television. The women immediately separated the beds, placing them on either side of the room, and put the wall lockers between them to act as a privacy screen down the center. It only allowed them a three-foot wide space between the bed and the lockers, but the privacy was worth it.

  Anna turned on her radio as the two of them went through their nightly routine of preparing to go to the showers. Kelsey took out her hair bands and the multitude of pins that kept her shoulder-length, raven black hair in place and within Army regulations. She breathed a sigh of contentment at the releasing of pressure, then sat on the camping chair she’d bought online to take off her boots.

  Kelsey felt a slight tremor of trepidation as she did so, remembering the poor grunt’s feet from that morning. They’d been a disgusting mass of damaged, waterlogged flesh. She pushed past her silly fears. She hadn’t been in the field for over a month without taking her boots off to change socks. Her feet were fine.

  “So, you think the boys will be back tomorrow?” she called over to Anna, who was going through her own after work ritual.

  “I hope so. I miss Jon something fierce,” Anna replied in her thick Mississippi accent.

  Kelsey looked up from her feet to the picture of her and Craig on her nightstand. It wasn’t anything so incriminating as them in civilian clothes or even in an embrace—that would just be dumb and asking for an investigation of some type. The picture was her in her uniform, holding her rifle low across her body, while Craig was in his Army physical fitness uniform, his own rifle slung on one large, rounded shoulder. In the picture, he was grinning widely and glistening with sweat from a workout at the gym. The infantry could always be found at the dining facility or the gym when they weren’t on mission. They’d been dating for a week when that picture was taken and she’d printed it off on the color printer at work. The quality wasn’t great, but it’s all she had.

  “The news said that combat troops left a few days ago,” Kelsey repeated the same thing they’d said that morning at breakfast. “That means they gotta be back soon, right?”

  Anna appeared at the edge of the wall lockers, her blonde hair leading the way. “They’ll be back soon. We just need to be thankful that they weren’t hurt.”

  She nodded in agreement and sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. You ready?”

  “Gimme two minutes,” Anna replied.

  She disappeared once more and Kelsey stood. She took off her uniform top and slipped her feet into the shower shoes she had resting under her bed. Then, she took a clean physical fitness uniform from her locker, stuffing them into her shower bag. The dreaded gray t-shirt and black shorts that comprised the Army’s PT uniform never seemed to get completely clean in the wash and always had a lingering odor that she hated. Unfortunately, civilian clothes weren’t authorized, so she had to wear it after her shower. Finally, she slung her long M-16 rifle over her shoulder. The damn thing was bulky. She wished she was in a combat unit that got the new, shorter M-4s. It would have saved her a ton of annoyance.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” Kelsey said, slipping on her black fleece before pushing her way through their CHU’s small door. The women had two plywood benches out front that the previous occupants passed on to them when they redeployed where they often sat during the night when the temperatures weren’t so bad.

  Outside, several of the CHUs sported twinkling Christmas lights. The holiday was only five days away, so everyone was feeling homesick. The fact that the biggest operation of the war was going on had intensified the feelings, so people ordered lights and small trees, stockings, Santa hats, and all sorts of things online and had them delivered to the desert. It wasn’t much, but every little bit helped to distract them from the very real dangers of the war.

  The door creaked open behind her as a gust of chill air blew by, swirling the dust up from the gravel outside their room. Several soldiers at the hospital who were nearing their twelve-month mark in country said the base got cold and rainy in the winter months. Once, the temperature had even dipped down near freezing. It made everyone miserable since most people only brought the bare minimum of cold weather gear thinking the desert would be hot year-round. Thankfully, Kelsey had brought everything they issued her, so she was okay for now.

  Anna came out and they walked the quarter mile to the latrines and showers. It wasn’t the most convenient setup, but they were at war, so Kelsey was content to have an enclosed space to do her business instead of between a couple of vehicles like the women who’d made the attack run from Kuwait had to do the previous year.